The Bush-Cheney regime is America's first
neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime
has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of
powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of
America's moral reputation along with the
infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless
thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been
prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on
a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and
Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US
Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world
is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of
ideologues—principally Vice President Dick Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay
Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney
General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have
controlled policy. They have been supported by their
media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review,
Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and by "scholars" in assorted
think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

The entirety of their success in miring the United
States in what could become permanent conflict in the
Middle East is based on the power of propaganda and the
big lie.

Initially, the 9/11 attack was blamed on Osama bin
Laden, but after an American puppet was installed in
Afghanistan, the blame for 9/11 was shifted to Iraq's
Saddam Hussein, who was said to have weapons of mass
destruction that would be used against America. The
regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to tell the
lie to the UN that the Bush-Cheney regime had conclusive
proof of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Having conned the UN, Congress, and the American
people, the regime invaded Iraq under totally false
pretenses and with totally false expectations. The
regime's occupation of Iraq has failed in a military
sense, but the neoconservatives are turning their
failure into a strategic advantage. At the beginning of
this year President Bush began blaming Iran for
America's embarrassing defeat by a few thousand lightly
armed insurgents in Iraq.

Bush accuses Iran of arming the Iraqi insurgents, a
charge that experts regard as improbable. The Iraqi
insurgents are Sunni. They inflict casualties on our
troops, but spend most of their energy killing Iraqi
Shi'ites, who are closely allied with Iran, which is
Shi'ite. Bush's accusation requires us to believe that
Iran is arming the enemies of its allies.

On the basis of this absurd accusation—a pure
invention—Bush has ordered a heavy concentration of
aircraft carrier attack forces off Iran's coast, and he
has moved US attack planes to Turkish bases and other US
bases in countries contingent to Iran.

In testimony before Congress on February 1 of this
year, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski said that he expected the regime to
orchestrate a "head-on conflict with Iran and with
much of the world of Islam at large." He said a
plausible scenario was "a terrorist act blamed on
Iran, culminating in a 'defensive' US military action
against Iran." He said that the neoconservative
propaganda machine was already articulating a
"mythical historical narrative" for widening their
war against Islam.[Testimony in
PDF]

Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars,
the reasons for which are patently false. What is going
on?

There are several parts to the answer. Like their
forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution,
the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the
National Socialists of Hitler's revolution,
neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on
virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of
the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle
East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are
closely allied, are both in the Middle East.

The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil
and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban
were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of
Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had
been on UNOCAL's payroll, as puppet prime minister. US
neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on
UNOCAL's payroll, was installed as US ambassador to
Afghanistan.

Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador
to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control
over the exploitation of Iraq's oil resources.

The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more
important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual
collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel's
enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel's
enemies" consist of the Muslim countries not in the
hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has
been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that
today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise
an independent country. The US and Israeli governments
blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting
Palestinian resistance to Israel's theft of Palestine.

The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans
drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in
the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to
implement the plans. However, an excuse was required.
Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor,"
and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order
to stampede the public and Congress into war.
Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the
9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable
facts emerged.

The neoconservatives have had enormous help from the
corporate media, from Christian evangelicals,
particularly from the "Rapture Evangelicals,"
from flag-waving superpatriots, and from the
military-industrial complex whose profits have
prospered. But the fact remains that the dozen men named
in the second paragraph above were able to overthrow the
US Constitution and launch military aggression under the
guise of a preventive/preemptive "war against
terrorism."

When the American people caught on that the "war
on terror" was a cloak for wars of aggression, they
put Democrats in control of Congress in order to apply a
brake to the regime's warmongering. However, the
Democrats have proven to be impotent to stop the
neoconservative drive to wider war and, perhaps, world
conflagration.

We are witnessing the triumph of a dozen evil men
over American democracy and a free press.